Public Lands
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The Idaho BLM is proposing to remove juniper from over 600,000 acres of land in the Owyhee River area of southern Idaho ostensibly to benefit nesting sage grouse. Sage grouse avoid treed areas, so the idea is to cut down juniper to increase sage grouse habitat quality. While there is no doubt from the literature…
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Why Collaboration Won’t Protect our Public Lands By Rick Meis, Halfway, OR Collaboration is a process of playing two sides off against each other in order to create enough guilt in one or all the parties that a compromise is reached. The primary problem is that it is specifically NOT based on science and best…
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The Forest Service is currently seeking public comments regarding the development of alternatives for the Forest Plan Revision on the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests in North Central Idaho. The deadline is February 28. The new forest plan will guide management direction over the next 10 – 30 years. A Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for…
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LAS VEGAS— Conservation groups have called on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to round up and remove the cattle of rancher Cliven Bundy, who has been illegally grazing his livestock on public lands for two and a half decades. U.S. District Court Judge Gloria Navarro on Monday dismissed all charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons…
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Most of environmental/conservation groups in the West are participants in various public land collaboratives. The majority are forest-oriented like the Northwest Forestry Collaborative https://www.conservationnw.org/our-work/wildlands/forest-collaboration/ or the Deschutes Forest Collaborative in Oregon http://deschutescollaborativeforest.org/ or the Southwest Crown Collaborative in Montana https://www.swcrown.org/. Though there are others like the Wyoming Public Lands Initiative https://wcca.wygisc.org/wpli/homepage/index.html which focuses primarily…
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Bundys go free again: scoflaw rancher wins, sort of. Federal prosecutors fail to bring justice again. Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro of Nevada has dismissed the federal government’s criminal case against Cliven Bundy, his sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, plus militia journalist Ryan Payne. She had recently declared a mistrial in the ongoing trial…
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by Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project The Trump administration has just launched a process to dismantle the greater sage-grouse land-use plan amendments that were put in place in 2015 to avert an Endangered Species listing for the bird. The emerging consensus is that this move undermines wildlife conservation, and represents yet another attack on science,…
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by Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project On Monday, President Trump took his first trip to Utah to sign a proclamation gutting the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to make way for drilling, mining, and other commercial exploitation fundamentally incompatible with protecting fragile and priceless treasures. In his speech before an invitation-only crowd of…